Women are more aggressive partners than men.....

Nora, I certainly think aggressive is something everybody needs to feel capable of.

Having thought over what has been said on the thread, and my own knowledge of people who have been violently assaulted, I think that while violence is only one form of aggression, it is still aggression.

Many of the main forms of both violent physical abuse and other forms of abuse are not listed on the survey while most aggressive victim defences are. The survey simply does not measure a lot of violent aggression.

I do not believe that lots of men are violent towards other men. I believe a few are and the others defend themselves against that violence, hence the survey results. And the same for women defending themselves against violence.

Most of the extremely violent acts that people I know have left partners over are not listed on that survey, nor are many acts committed against men in bars etc.

As I suspected, a certain father's rights organisation is all over this study like a rash, and are now slagging off Women's Aid (in addition to Gingerbread, JK Rowling and so on)

OP - it sounds to me as though you are writing an essay/paper and are getting MNetters to do your critique for you.

I think that was her point, Dad. She was discussing it as a failing of the study. Men are socialised in general, to be more aggressive. They may not always realise when their behaviour in relationships is aggressive or intimidating, and therefore won't self-report in studies like the one being discussed in the OP.

Self reported? But if someone felt they did not act aggressively, even if they invaded your personal space, be they male or female, why on earth would they ever self report? It would be like that old Seinfeld moment:

Huh? I was talking about self reported aggression.

I don't need a 6'+ man to do much more than get in my personal space to feel the threat. Would he report that as aggression?

But why would he? If the inverse were true, you walked into his personal space, would he report that as aggression on your part? He would probably just consider it annoying or see you as a socially awkward 'close talker'. Perhaps he would think you were hitting on him. Even if you were openly angry you could still be below his base level of perceived threat. He may even consider your aggression as sexy, if he thought it was justified and not crazy, because balanced men these days like feisty women, not demure little flowers.

Perhaps you raise your threat level by being openly hostile. Even then he might blow off your behaviour as letting off steam or blow it off as being 'cute' if you were his SO. Unless you cranked your behaviour up high enough for him your aggression may never be perceived as such, except in an abstract sense, rather than a directly threatening one.

Thus you don't get put down as an aggressive woman, even if aggressive is exactly what you feel, you are just being overly emotional.

Also: See This thing about male victims

The shame here is that this study will be gleefully leapt upon by MRAs, and over-simplistically reported in the media - as the "40% victims of dv are male" headline in the Guardian was.

Very interesting posts, DonkeySkin, thank you.

OP, my figures are from the Ministry of Justice 2011-2012:

Gender of Offenders, England and Wales. There is a link to the source in the tweets underneath the graph.

I apologise, the figure of 98%, in fact, relates to the proportion of sexual violence by men. The proportions of violence against the person committed by men was around 88%. Pretty damning, and male dominated, though - as are the stats you quote in your post.

In 2012 Karen Ingala Smith started writing the Counting Dead Women blog She has continued it up to today.

She also wrote Can you give me a link to Counting Dead Men?

Posters have rightly criticised the Dr Bates's study - in the light of the ^ above, it is very strange to argue that women are the more aggressive and controlling in a relationship.

There are far better in depth academic studies into the gendered nature of IPV - they have been linked on here in the past - I'll try to find them.

Also, let's not forget that women are socialised to not be aggressive, so it may be that self reports are not reporting the same thing. The men might not class an act as aggressive, whereas a woman would do so.

Oh, I have so much to say on this, but am incoherent.

She doesn't define as a feminist, does she? Otherwise, my head might actually explode.

Oh, and on the physical aggression thing. Self reports on this are a weak research pool. As a 5' 3" woman, I don't need a 6'+ man to do much more than get in my personal space to feel the threat. Would he report that as aggression? And, as I always point out on IPV threads, the incidences are the important number, not the existence.

It all seems a bit "thin", or is it just me?

Like, if you asked a wife who did 90% of the domestic labour if she'd ever nagged and asked her husband likewise. I imagine that there would be a discrepancy in the numbers. But those 2 bald facts get us nowhere.

So controlling about amount of time spent with family and friends - maybe because the man thinks that there is less of a relationship there than the woman. Why might that be? Who is fed the romantic fairytale? Maybe he sees the relationship as more of something to do when there aren't more interesting people about? Maybe he's just after a fuck when he's bored? Maybe he thinks that women are for breeding with and providing for his physical needs and actual human interaction comes from others? Or maybe she's abusive?

Great comments and links, DonkeySkin.

Me too almondcakes. Thanks so much for the very insightful and well referenced critique, donkeyskin. Definitely a thread to book mark.

As usual, I'm really grateful that so many people on here know so much stuff.

I'm not sure if you interpreted my posts of being supportive of the study or whether you judged my words as critical? It's the latter, but less on the basis of detailed knowledge of the subject matter, more on the basis that it reduces what is an extremely complicated and culturally bound phenomenon to what boils down to ask people whodunnit then count it up.

Yes, sorry, Buffy, I think I did misunderstand your position. I agree with your last sentence.

The trouble is, this type of positivistic study does carry a powerful voice.

Yes it does. And people are not aware of the methodology behind such studies and take them at face value. This is going to be a big probelm for feminist campaigners on MVAW, as the men's rights movement grows stronger. As Romeyroo notes, the backlash began a long time ago and it has been quite successful in muddying perceptions around domestic violence. IMO feminists really need to emphasise actual violence statistics as the most reliable method of assessing rates of IPV.

For anyone interested in this subject further, I highly recommend Michael Kimmel's paper on the two methods primarily used by researchers studying IPV: the Conflict Tactics Scale, and Crime Victimisation Studies. He surveyed decades of data on intimate partner violence from the US, comparing the results of 'Family Conflict Studies' (which use CTS) with Crime Victimisation Studies, which use data from police, hospitals, domestic violence shelters and the Bureau of Justice.

According to Kimmel, studies using the CTS routinely find gender parity in IPV, whereas those using the Crime Victimisation statistics find that it is overwhelmingly women who are the victims of violence by male partners.

"Crime victimization studies have large sample sizes, in part because they are funded by national, state, and local government agencies. Crime victimization studies include a wide range of assaults, including sexual assault in their samples. And they ask not only about current partner (spouse or cohabiting partner) but also about ex-spouse. But they ask only about those events that the person experiences - or even reports to municipal authorities - as a crime, and therefore miss those events that are neither perceived as nor reported as crimes.

"[CVR] studies uniformly find dramatic gender asymmetry in rates of domestic violence.* According to the U.S. Department of Justice, of the one million cases of “intimate partner violence” reported each year, female victims outnumber male victims by more than five to one. In their analysis of police data, Dobash and Dobash (1979) for example, found that only 1% of all domestic violence cases in two cities in Scotland were assaults by wives...

"Crime victimization studies report high rates of injury to women from domestic assault, from 76% (NVAW), 75% (NCS) and 52% (NCVS).
Crime victimization studies further find that domestic violence increases in severity over time, so that earlier “moderate” violence is likely to be followed by more sever violence later (Johnson and Ferraro, 2000). This emerges also in discussions of spousal homicide, where significant numbers of people murdered by their spouses or ex-spouses were also earlier victims of violence.

"In sum, crime victimization studies typically find that domestic violence is rare, serious, escalates over time, and is perpetrated by men.

"Those who insist on gender symmetry [in domestic violence] must also account for two statistical anomalies. First, there is the dramatic disproportion of women in shelters and hospital emergency care facilities. Why is it that when we begin at the end of the domestic violence experience – when we examine the serious injuries that often are its consequence -- the rates are so dramatically asymmetrical? Second, claims of gender symmetry in marital violence must be squared with the empirical certainty that in every single other arena of social life, men are far more disproportionately likely to use violence than women. Why are women so much more violent in the home that their rates approach, or even exceed, those of men, while in every other non-domestic arena men’s rates of violence are about nine times those of women (on rates of violence generally, see Kimmel, 2000)?"

"Let’s begin where the CTS begins. Here is the opening paragraph to the survey as administered (Straus, 1990):

No matter how well a couple gets along, there are times when they disagree, get annoyed with the other person, or just have spats or fights because they’re in a bad mood or tired or for some other reason. They also use many different ways of trying to settle their differences. I’m going to read some things that you and your (spouse/partner) might do when you have an argument. I would like you to tell me how many times...in the past 12 months you ... (Straus, 1990).

"Such a framing assumes that domestic violence is the result of an argument, that it has more to do with being tired or in a bad mood than it does with an effort to control another person. This may, of course, be true of a significant amount of domestic violence, but it is certainly not true of all.

"As we can see, the CTS asks about frequency, although only for one year. Asking how often in the past year either spouse hit the other may capture some version of reality, but does not capture an ongoing systematic pattern of abuse and violence over many years. This is akin to the difference between watching a single frame of a movie and the movie itself.

Context

"The CTS simply counts acts of violence, but takes no account of the circumstances under which these acts occur. Who initiates the violence, the relative size and strength of the people involved, the nature of the relationship all will surely shape the experience of the violence, but not the scores on the CTS. Thus, if she pushes him back after being severely beaten, it would be scored one “conflict tactic” for each. And if she punches him to get him to stop beating their children, or pushes him away after he has sexually assaulted her, it would count as one for her, none for him.

"In response to these criticisms, Straus and his colleagues acknowledge that the context is important, but believe that it is preferable to explore the context separately from the incidence. This response is unpersuasive, more like observing that death rates have soared for males between 19 and 30 without explaining that a country has declared war."

new.vawnet.org/Assoc_Files_VAWnet/GenderSymmetry.pdf

Wow, thank you for that Donkeyskin. I was reading the posts thinking what about context?!

I am really curious about the shift you describe from 'wife-battering' to intimate partner violence where the discourse is that women do it too, hence family violence. You are quoting literature from the early 1990s which means that Women's Aid was barely off the ground before their aims were appropriated to use against women. That is a very quick backlash.

I do think the point about the trajectory of the researcher's career and the agenda of universities, or at least her university, is valid. Although she may have a temporary lectureship, I don't like to speculate, even then you still normally need some publications behind you.

And Buffy, you say this study uses the Conflict Tactics Scale - are you aware that the CTS is considered severely flawed by many researchers in this field, and is mainly used and promoted by people associated with the Men's Rights Movement?

"Gender symmetry [in domestic violence] is often reported in studies employing large, random, and national or community samples and using the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS), a questionnaire that asks about recent use of specific tactics by an intimate partner against the respondent to measure IPA (Brush, 1990; Cantos, Neidig, & O'Leary, 1994; Johnson, 1995; Morse, 1995). Morse (1995) suggests that the goal is to reconceptualize the social problem of ""woman battering"" to one of ""family violence."" From this perspective, some scholars tend to conclude that men and women are equally likely to be both perpetrators and victims of IPA.

"Several arguments have been made to explain the huge discrepancies in scholars' interpretations of findings regarding women's use of violence against intimate partners. These arguments include criticisms of the CTS as a measure of IPA, concerns over gender differences in reporting of IPA and its impact on abuse rates, the differences due to settings in which the data have been collected and the samples studied and, finally, issues related to studying victimization only versus victimization and perpetration.

"First, and at the heart of much of this criticism, is CTS: a set of scales designed by Strauss and Gelles, leaders in the ""family violence"" approach, to measure IPA (Strauss & Gelles, 1990). Some scholars have harshly criticized the CTS for ignoring the context, motivations, meanings, and consequences of IPA (see, for example, Bachman, 1998; Belknap, 2001; Berk, Berk, Loseke, & Rauma, 1983; DeKeseredy, 1995; Dasgupta , 2001; DesKeseredy & Schwartz, 1998; Dobash & Dobash, 1988; Kurz, 1993; Schwartz, 1987; Stark & Flitcraft, 1983; Yllo, 1983, for critiques). As stated previously, the studies reporting gender symmetry and the higher rates of female-perpetrated IPA predominantly use national sampling plans. These are also the studies most likely to employ the CTS to measure IPA. Thus, it is likely not the ""national"" sample that results in the different rates of female-perpetrated IPA, but rather the strong correlation between a study's likelihood of using the CTS and using a national sampling plan that leads to the reporting of gender symmetry. The use of the CTS clearly explains some of the discrepancies between the two approaches.

"Also, some researchers are concerned that the studies using the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) interpret the results incorrectly, and that this may account for the differences in the studies.

Dobash and colleagues report that in many of the studies finding higher rates of female-perpetrated IPA, a respondent who reports that he or she has ever, ""pushed,"" ""grabbed,"" ""shoved,"" ""slapped,"" or ""hit or tried to hit"" another person, is regarded as a perpetrator of IPA (Dobash et al., 1992). This may include only one instance not taken in context. Thus, when victims resist abuse in any way, including defending themselves or their children, they will mistakenly be portrayed as intimate partner abusers. For an excellent review of the history of the CTS, its past, revised, and current uses and limitations, read DeKeseredy and Schwartz (1998).

www.vawnet.org/applied-research-papers/print-document.php?doc_id=370

Sampling bias

"According to Michael Johnson, the CTS’s dependence on voluntary interviews with a representative sample population could create a strong bias against measuring the worse cases of domestic violence: “men who systematically terrorize their wives would hardly be likely to agree to participate in such a survey, and the women whom they beat would probably be terrified at the possibility that their husband might find out that they had answered such questions.

"Jack Stranton points out another important sampling bias: the CTS, as used in the original Straus/Gelles research and most of the research that follows it, excludes violence that occurs after a divorce or separation. However, such violence accounts for 76% of spousal assaults, and is overwhelmingly committed by men; excluding this violence disproportionately omits most spousal violence against women.

Contrary Social Science Data

"Many non-CTS studies have found, contrary to CTS results, that men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of domestic violence, while women are overwhelmingly the victims. Since most (but not all) of these studies are designed to measure criminal violence, Farrell dismisses them, saying men are socialized to “take it like a man” and not report their victimization. However, Russell Dobash pointed out “that women have their own reasons to be reticent, fearing both the loss of a jailed or alienated husband’s economic support and his vengeance.” Moreover, surveys of domestic violence victims in the US and Canada have found that men are more likely to call the police after being assaulted by their partner. So while it’s true that both men and women have motivation not to report their abuse, it’s just not true that men are actually less likely to report abuse than women.

"A review of the social science literature indicates that the CTS is, even according to its creators, seriously flawed when used as a comparative measure of male and female domestic victimization (i.e., the way men’s righters and anti-feminists use it)."

amptoons.com/blog/2004/06/26/on-husband-battering-are-men-equal-victims/

Yes, there are problems with retrospective self-report and socially desirable responding. But these are common to all such studies, I'm not sure how they'd apply particularly here, unless one could argue that men are women are likely to a) recall these events differently, maybe think of themselves in a better or worse light as time goes by and b) care in different ways or to different extents how such behaviours are perceived by others.

Buffy, this is precisely what happens in self-reporting of heterosexual domestic violence, because of the gendered power differences between men and women and the sexist norms both are likely to subscribe to.

It has been found, consistently, that women typically minimise the violence and bullying they receive from their partners and men exaggerate it. It is fairly clear why women would tend to minimise their partners' violent and controlling behaviour - sexist cultural norms they have absorbed tell them that it is normal, it is embarrassing, and it is in some way their fault. They also have a psychological need to excuse and deny men's abusive behaviour if they and their kids' are dependent on him.

But why would men tend to exaggerate the violence they receive from women? Lundy Bancroft, who has counselled violent and controlling men for decades, says the answer is simple: men who report their partners as violent towards them are very frequently abusers themselves, who have every reason in the world to portray their relationship (to themselves, and, especially, to others) as mutually abusive, in which the woman aggresses against him as much as he does to her.

Bancroft says most of the violent men he works with learn the language of domestic violence quickly (language that was developed by feminists to articulate actual domestic violence), and turn it back on their partners, many of whom they have severely abused and terrorised. Abusive men in counselling for their behaviour describe their female partners (victims) as controlling and manipulative and frequently prone to resort to violence themselves. They portray incidents in which they have beaten their partners as 'fights' in which she gave almost as good as she got (if the woman attempted to defend herself in anyway, this becomes 'she hit me').

Bancroft says reliance on self-reporting as an accurate measure of inter-personal violence between men and women is severely flawed for that reason, and it is having devastating impacts on women and children in the legal and psychiatric systems, because mental health professionals and social workers frequently take the reports of both men and women at face value, and sometimes women who are victims of abusive men end up being pegged as abusers themselves, based largely on the way the man has portrayed the relationship to case workers, in which every action the woman has done to protect herself and her children, from shoving her partner away when he attempts to intimidate her ('she is violent') to trying to ensure her husband makes the mortgage payments on time so they don't lose their house ('she nags me to the point of psychological distress and uses money to control me') becomes evidence of a female abuser. Conversely, the woman is usually trying to minimise her partner's behaviour to herself and others, and so will make constant excuses for him and downplay his violence (he has occasionally hit me when he lost his temper) and controlling behaviour ('it's because he really cares about me and the kids').

Bancroft is particularly critical of the way psychologists and others interpret family violence in terms of gender-neutral psychological conditions (loss of impulse control, a controlling personality, childhood trauma, etc.). He says family violence (defined as a pattern of abusive behaviour designed specifically to control and intimidate a partner and children) is overwhelmingly a male problem, because it is a problem of values, not mental health. Sexist values, specifically. Men who abuse their partners and children do so not because they have poor impulse control, or unresolved PTSD, but because they fundamentally believe they have a right to do so, as men. Therefore, we cannot accurately asses interpersonal violence between men and women without taking account of the sexist cultural norms both have absorbed, which have been built up over thousands of years of women and children being regarded as men's property. Ignoring this is disastrous for women and children and obscures the patriarchal dynamics at work.

This explains the huge gap between studies that rely on self-reports of interpersonal violence (which often find surprising levels of parity in female/male abusive behaviours) and the actual violence statistics coming from hospitals, battered women''s shelters, police reports and murder statistics, which show that it is overwhelmingly a male-on-female phenomenon.

www.amazon.com/Why-Does-He-That-Controlling/dp/0425191656

OP, The facts I was referring to is that 98% of violent crime is committed by men according to the Home Office. Men are actually more, not less likely to report violent crime against them (source: Karen Ingala-Smith) and 2-3 women per week die at the hands of a partner/ ex-partner. 2-3 men per week do not.

I think it's perfectly possible that women will over-estimate self-reported aggressive incidents though, and men underestimate them- simply due to socialisation of girls and boys in our society.